All Necessary Force: A Pike Logan Thriller by Taylor Brad

Author:Taylor, Brad [Taylor, Brad]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781101559901
Publisher: Penguin Group
Published: 2012-01-16T23:00:00+00:00

42

T

he chirp of the keylogger brought me out of my doze. I rubbed my eyes and focused on the laptop in front of me. The image on the screen woke me up like a shot of cold water. Whoever was on the computer was finally typing something we could use.

After the fiasco at Old Town, we’d repeated the operation from Indonesia by breaking into Noordin’s office, only with much less drama. We’d found next to nothing, either in the office itself or in the aircraft with his company name. The office wasn’t really designed for commercial business at all. Just a two-room suite located at the general aviation section of the Prague Airport. Apparently, its only use was to give the pilots some rest between flights. It held a single computer, and although it was on a network, the fifty-pound heads at Taskforce headquarters could glean absolutely nothing suspicious from the hard drive.

When they came up empty, we’d gone back in and placed a wireless keylogger on the system. A simple device that was inserted between the USB port and the USB plug of the keyboard, it would transmit everything that someone typed on the keyboard, along with a screen shot of what he or she was looking at, to a collection device just outside the office. We’d dialed into the collection device through the cell network, allowing us to see the activity in real time.

It was a lot of effort for potentially very little payback, but we were out of options and grasping at straws. Until now, because it looked like it might have worked.

“Retro. Get in here.”

I leaned the monitor back so he could see it. “Looks like someone’s filing a flight plan.”

“Where to?”

“Budapest, supposedly. Wonder if that’s where he’s really going?”

“We could slap a beacon on it.”

I tried to see the downside, but short of never seeing the beacon again, I couldn’t find one. “Yeah, that’s a good idea. Give Buckshot a call. Tell him to get his ass out to the tarmac.”

“How much time’s he got?”

“Hang on, the time of departure and tail number’s coming up.”

Thirty seconds later, the information appeared on our screen, scrolling across letter by letter, eerily looking like a ghost was typing.

“Damn,” I said. “He’s leaving in the next three hours. With preflight, Buckshot’s got about thirty to forty-five minutes. Get him moving.”

Retro relayed the information, while whoever was at the computer submitted the flight plan and began typing a short e-mail. It was random bullshit, with nothing that raised my eyebrows. Eventually, he closed out of that as well, leaving us nothing to do but wait. Twenty-two minutes later, my phone rang.

“Pike, it’s Jennifer. Buckshot’s prepping the Diamondback down on the tarmac, but we’ve got a little problem. There are two planes with the tail number you sent.”

“Two? Of the same kind?”

“Nope. One’s a Casa 212, the other’s a Twin Otter.”

The duplicate numbers were going to force me to make a choice, but at least now we knew something shady was going on.

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